Know Your History
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Chapter 1 Know Your History How do we know Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home with his mother until he was thirty, went into his father’s business, and had a mother who thought he was God. — Really old joke When I had babies, I hated being called Mama. (When the pediatrician airily did it— or called me Mother or Mommy— I wanted to use the snotsucker bulb on him.) I think to a degree I disliked it because it negated me as a person. It turned me into the vessel, the baby wearer, the stroller pusher, the milk source. It made me feel like a featureless feeder from a sci- fi flick. But I also shuddered because I had internalized certain stereotypes about what being a Jewish mother, specifically, meant. The Jewish mother stereotype isn’t pretty. It depicts someone needy, neurotic, clingy— a guilt- shooting laser whose entire identity comes from her children (preferably her son who is a doctor and her daughter who marries one). I 10 Inga_9780804141413_2p_all_r1.indd 10 5/12/16 10:45 AM MAMALEH KNOWS BEST had to process why, precisely, the words Jewish mother made me shudder— why I’d personalized this stereotype. I had to learn what the truth was, and where the cliché came from. For us to understand why Jewish parenting has worked so well throughout history— and has been so underheralded as the reason for Jews’ outsize success— we need to look at who the world thinks the Jewish mother is. Then we can look more closely at who she really is and what she’s done so right. Today, the most prominent old- school Jewish mother might be Kyle Broflovski’s mom, Sheila, on South Park— fat, loud, with a New Jersey accent and helmet hair, per- petually spluttering in outrage, “What, What, WHAT?” and kvetching about anti- Semitism. Then there’s Judith Light’s narcissistic, neurotic Shelly Pfefferman on Trans- parent, and Tovah Feldshuh’s mother to Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex- Girlfriend, belting an aria of criticism and guilt (“By the way you’re looking healthy / and by healthy I mean chunky / I don’t mean that as an insult / I’m just stating it as fact . I see your eczema is back!”). Until 2015, there was Howard Wolowitz’s mother on The Big Bang Theory, a guilt- hurling, soul- crushing, son- infantilizing, housecoat- wearing, Yiddish- inflected force of nature, perpetually bel- lowing at her progeny from somewhere offscreen. These characters come from a long tradition of funny and not- so- funny jokes and stereotypes. Today, we Jews are primarily perceived as regular boring white people, but once we were considered pre- Tiger- Mother Tiger Mothers. Back in the day, Catskills comics got endless material from the notion of Jewish mothers as suffocating, whining, melo- dramatic, demanding grief givers. 11 Inga_9780804141413_3p_all_r1.indd 11 6/14/16 12:13 PM MARJORIE INGALL Q. What did the waiter ask the table of Jewish mothers? A. Is ANYTHING all right? A Jewish mother is walking down the street with her two little sons. A passerby says, “Oh, they’re so cute! How old are they?” The Jewish mother responds, “The doctor is three and the lawyer is two.” Q. Why do Jewish mothers make great parole officers? A. They never let anyone finish a sentence. A lot of these Jewish mother jokes have the schticky rhythms of the Borscht Belt, a lost world of Jewish resorts where many American comics got their start or performed regularly. (Among them: Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Rod- ney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, Jerry Lewis, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, and Jerry Stiller. To name a few.) But while performers in these hotels mocked Jewish mothers, the hotels themselves were often run by Jew- ish mothers. That’s where we start to see the truth behind the stereotype. And that’s what I think is worth emulating. A QUICK PRIMER ON THE HISTORICAL (NOT HYSTERICAL) JEWISH MOTHER For great swaths of Jewish history, men studied and women worked. Jews valued brains because brains were all we had. We were a wandering people. Throughout recorded history, pretty much every time Jews got comfortable, they wound up getting booted from whatever country they were liv- 12 Inga_9780804141413_3p_all_r1.indd 12 6/14/16 12:13 PM MAMALEH KNOWS BEST ing in. Jews were expelled from England in the thirteenth century, France and Hungary in the fourteenth, Austria and Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth, just for starters. Hasidic folktales are full of wanderers, of lessons taught in motion. So much of Jewish identity has been tied to feel- ing homeless, worrying about where it’s safe to lay one’s hat. The anxiety is right there in our ancient texts, and it’s in what actually happened to us throughout history. Every period of comfort and luxury was followed by a massacre or an expulsion. Jews learned that it was difficult to trust good times and good things. For many centuries in many countries, Jews were for- bidden to own land, barred from many professions, subject to discriminatory laws and taxes. When circumstances are awful and uncertain, the things you can rely on are inter- nal: wit, literacy, and spirituality. So men studied— doing the thing that Jews truly cherished. Which is great, but someone had to put bread on the table. That meant that while men were scholars, women were often the breadwin- ners. In tough times, mamalehs stepped up. But times were not always tough. While most people (Jews included) think of Jewish history as an endless string of pogroms and persecution, there were numerous time periods in various countries in which being a Jew did not suck. In these good times, Jewish women owned property, pleaded causes in court, created art, wrote their own prayer books, ran big businesses. They raised children who became prominent philosophers, composers, novelists, merchants, scientists, philanthropists. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE (Before the Com- mon Era— many Jews don’t use the term “BC,” what with Christ not being our particular guy) some Jews lived pretty 13 Inga_9780804141413_2p_all_r1.indd 13 5/12/16 10:45 AM MARJORIE INGALL luxurious lives. Egyptian Jews had snazzy homes, were worldly and acculturated lives, and liked nice clothes. Jews in Jerusalem muttered that they were insufficiently religious and too prone to intermarry. (Muttering about other Jews being insufficiently religious is still a common Jewish pas- time today.) Similarly, at different times in Persia, the Hel- lenistic world, Spain and Portugal, Germany, France and England, Jews lived urban and urbane lives in which they associated with their non- Jewish neighbors and enjoyed the fruits of majority culture. Jewish women had political and economic power from the very beginning of recorded history. On the Egyptian island of Elephantine, a woman named Mibtahiah, born in 476 BCE, owned her own house. She married twice and allowed both husbands to use her home, which was sweet of her. In wildly different environments— both hostile and welcoming— Jewish mothers managed to support their families, emotionally and economically, and raise impres- sive, creative, highly educated, and ambitious kids. They were clearly doing something right. Don’t we want to do the same? THE AMERICAN JEWISH MOTHER Yet somehow, after World War II, the Jewish mother became an object of mockery. A confluence of factors was responsi- ble: Jews started to move to the burbs, the promised land of lawns and goyim. Jewish sons began to learn to talk like cul- tured Americans while their (superembarrassing) mothers retained their ethnic Old Country speaking rhythms. Jew- 14 Inga_9780804141413_3p_all_r1.indd 14 6/14/16 12:13 PM MAMALEH KNOWS BEST ish mothers reeled from the horrifying news of the deaths of six million Jews overseas and reacted, perhaps, with more than usual clinginess toward their own children. Indeed, I don’t think you can overstate the psycho- logical repercussions of the Holocaust. Jews throughout the country saw the gulf between their own affluent lives and the recent obliteration of Jewish worlds an ocean away. There’s a kernel of truth in many stereotypes . including that of the Jewish mother. I’m certainly willing to believe that Jewish mothers in the 1950s and 1960s clung a little more tightly to their children. I suspect that post- Holocaust anxiety was part of why the Jewish mother became a cari- cature, paired with American Jews experiencing a time of increasing suburbanization, assimilation, and Jewish eco- nomic advancement. But the stereotype really gained traction because of the changing media landscape. American Jewish male writers— freed in an age of antiheroic literature to tell their own kinds of stories— created squawking, controlling Jew- ish mother characters. TV picked up the stereotypes and broadcast them further. In the 1950s, 77 percent of Ameri- can households purchased their first TV. Suddenly Jewish boys with mama issues had what today’s media machers call a platform. This time period also coincided with the rise of the nebbishy, antiheroic voice in fiction. Suddenly a lot of youngish Jewish male writers had the voice and opportu- nity to express their own autobiographical mishegas about their mothers. Writers like Herman Wouk, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow and jokesters like Woody Allen and Jackie Mason wrote with varying levels of sexism and conflicted feelings about their moms. Basically, here we have a bunch 15 Inga_9780804141413_2p_all_r1.indd 15 5/12/16 10:45 AM MARJORIE INGALL of nerdy guys coming of age in an era in which Jews are rapidly melded into wider society while still feeling like out- siders.